What are you going to do?"
"Eh?" he said.
"Eh? Eh?"
We racked our brains for where to go and what to do.
I realized it was up to me.
Poor, poor Dean – the devil himself had never fallen farther; in idiocy, with infected thumb, surrounded by the battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and back numberless times, an undone bird.
"Let's walk to New York," he said, "and as we do so let's take stock of everything along the way – yass."
I took out my money and counted it; I showed it to him.
"I have here," I said, "the sum of eighty-three dollars and change, and if you come with me let's go to New York – and after that let's go to Italy."
"Italy?" he said.
His eyes lit up.
"Italy, yass – how shall we get there, dear Sal?"
I pondered this.
"I'll make some money, I'll get a thousand dollars from the publishers.
We'll go dig all the crazy women in Rome, Paris, all those places; we'll sit at sidewalk cafes; we'll live in whorehouses.
Why not go to Italy?"
"Why yass," said Dean, and then realized I was serious and looked at me out of the corner of his eye for the first time, for I'd never committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence, and that look was the look of a man weighing his chances at the last moment before the bet.
There were triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time.
I looked back at him and blushed.
I said, "What's the matter?" I felt wretched when I asked it.
He made no answer but continued looking at me with the same wary insolent side-eye.
I tried to remember everything he'd done in his life and if there wasn't something back there to make him suspicious of something now.
Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said
– "Come to New York with me; I've got the money."
I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears.
Still he stared at me.
Now his eyes were blank and looking through me.
It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories.
Something clicked in both of us.
In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain only from what he did afterward.
He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled.
"What was that look?" I asked.
He was pained to hear me say that.
He frowned.
It was rarely that Dean frowned.
We both felt perplexed and uncertain of something.
We were standing on top of a hill on a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco; our shadows fell across the sidewalk.
Out of the tenement next to Camille's house filed eleven Greek men and women who instantly lined themselves up on the sunny pavement while another backed up across the narrow street and smiled at them over a camera.
We gaped at these ancient people who were having a wedding party for one of their daughters, probably the thousandth in an unbroken dark generation of smiling in the sun.
They were well dressed, and they were strange.
Dean and I might have been in Cyprus for all of that.
Gulls flew overhead in the sparkling air.
"Well," said Dean in a very shy and sweet voice, "shall we go?"
"Yes," I said, "let's go to Italy."
And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good arm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.
3
First thing, we went to a bar down on Market Street and decided everything – that we would stick together and be buddies till we died.
Dean was very quiet and preoccupied, looking at the old bums in the saloon that reminded him of his father.
"I think he's in Denver – this time we must absolutely find him, he may be in County Jail, he may be around Larimer Street again, but he's to be found.
Agreed?"